What are horizontal and vertical scaling? And when do you use them? Vertical scaling is adding oomph to the machine that an application is running on. Perhaps your e-commerce site is getting more traffic as your business grows, and it’s starting to creak at the seams. A common way to give the application a boost,… [Continued]
I attended the Amazon Web Services Cloud for Start-Ups & Developers Event in London today, there were several really useful talks and a nice run through of some of the newer AWS technologies. Here are my top three picks from the day: #1 EC2 Autoscaling We got some demos of some very solid and practical… [Continued]
My mother always told me about the carpenter who would measure twice and cut once. It didn’t make any sense to me as a kid, but I soon understood exactly what she meant the day I built my first set of shelves. Hrm. If only I had listened to her sooner … It seems that… [Continued]
It’s happened to the best of us; no matter what scalability plans we put into place, no matter how many horizontally scaled virtual hosts we spin up, no matter how we shard our carefully crafted data, no matter how many greens we show in our automated tests, there’s always one element that might just catch… [Continued]
I’m often asked how we write scalable web applications. I’ve boiled down the long list of factors we consider to the following four key features. It isn’t an exhaustive list, but any web app missing any of these is at best an unknown, and at worst heading for trouble! #1 Multitiered Application Architecture Writing your… [Continued]
High Jump In scalable systems development it’s all too easy to focus on the highs. The plaudits are there for people who can claim ‘My system can scale to 200 thousand bazillion customers! Simultaneously!’. Yet not all businesses function like Facebook, Amazon or Twitter. Regular businesses suffer peaks and troughs of activity. Limbo Efficient handling… [Continued]